The present invention relates to real-time system management, and more specifically, to expressing manageable resource topology graphs as dynamic stateful resources.
A resource topology includes a defined arrangement of manageable resources and the relationships between those resources. Management applications such as System Consoles, Configuration Management Applications, and Business Resilience Management have a need to reason about, visualize, and manage the various topologies that exist within a customer's environment.
Conventional representations of topologies have several functional deficiencies with respect to the creation of topology graphs as well as with respect to the lifecycle of the topology representations. For example, prior implementations generated a static graph representation from information in a database. Any changes in the resource state are not reflected in the topology representation thus, providing an out-of-date view of the topology. Any management action taken on the basis of such a view can cause inconsistencies in the configuration of the environment, and management actions can fail or even misconfigure resources in a way that will influence the execution of business applications.